Being a massive information nerd. I’ve always been one. In school I was voracious at consuming information. I’m also good at making iteration tweaks on what I learn. Though I’m not exactly like everyone else when I do it.
In college I remember overhearing a mutual friend asking my roommate if I ever opened a book or studied outside of class.
He responded: “When he needs to he will.”
In my mind I was thinking, do I seem like I don’t study?
As it turned out, I was extremely good at absorbing information in class. It stuck extremely well and I found that most of the stuff that ended up on tests was the information talked about in class. Thus with a few notes, I could easily recall the needed information.
Same goes for say, hearing memory. Once upon a time I was with Jeff Scott Soto where we were driving to a dinner with some friends and he played me a new song he was working on with Marcel Jacob for a Talisman record.
In the midst of listening to the song I asked him: “Did you guys sample the guitar part from your other song, then speed it up to change the key?”
Jeff looked at me in amazement wondering how in the hell could I tell that, then actually said as much. “How the hell can you tell that?
I suppose it was obvious to me. Over the years, I have had multiple instances where I can tell melodies and such and where they likely came from. I’m not as awesome as a recent viral video where a person was cluing off songs after hearing a single recorded note or two and instantly saying what song it is. That is savant-level of sonics. I’m not that, but I am pretty good knowing where I’ve heard something before.
To this day I still tend to spend an insane amount of time on research when I want to know something. Especially if I want to get a good working knowledge. Enough to get me in trouble.
It’s like that with my website. I’m still tweaking. Even after I’ve pretty much got it all together and working. In the last several hours I’ve finally figured out an issue with the buttons on the music archive page, and with the lyrics text links on the releases.
The buttons were not highlighting as a cursor went over them. This is despite it showing the correct information in the code on the back end. However, the displaying of it to you the end user wasn’t doing the right thing.
My answer came when I tried using the palate colors I’m currently running. Instead of multiple custom colors for each button, it was solved with tweaking the palate and then using the palate. A minor problem that to me should have worked with the custom colors as input.
Same with the text links, they weren’t doing what most people would expect when you hover over them. Light up and put an underline under them. There’s a stupid CSS workaround that I found. That isn’t the normal way to do it, but it worked. Now it’s obvious on the release page for each release, when you hover over the title of the song title or the word lyrics – it opens a plethora of nerd information.
There is more nerd fest stuff coming. Both musically, like the song for the College Park Skyhawks which released the morning this post went live. And for other stuff behind the scenes that is going to improve the website, the web store and the functionality of both.
Stay tuned!
p.s. there was another tweak to the contact page that should result in less spam messages. Take that bot-fuckers.